a substance. As for the second category, it consists of things such that, if two of them were posited, nothing would prevent them from occupying the same substrate and the same location, nor could they be conceived of as crowding one another there. Whoever reflects impartially on the two categories we have described will recognize the impossibility of positing a third category outside them.”

This argument applies to whatever exists, without qualification, and what he said concerning originated things can likewise be said without qualification. His statement, “what can be encompassed and precisely described, whether through sense perception or judgment,” applies to whatever exists, without distinguishing between the eternal and the originated. Rather, the mind’s apprehension of these two categories, through sense perception or judgment, concerns whatever exists, without restriction to origination or eternity. This is clear from the fact that the mind apprehends these two categories before knowing that existent things are divided into the originated and the eternal, and before knowing whether describing the eternal by one or both of these categories is impossible or permissible.

In short, if the judgment of the innate disposition is accepted in this classification, it must be accepted without qualification; if it is not accepted, it must be rejected without qualification, for the innate disposition makes no such distinction. Hence more than one eminent scholar of our time, well versed in philosophy and the Sharia, used to say: “There is only the position of the affirmers or that of the philosophers; anything in between is inconsistent.” And it has been established that the philosophers are more